April 03, 2017 – Perspective

Today’s image comes from a long walk I took along the Rillito River; there’s a walking path along the wash that cuts east-west across the northern area of midtown Tucson. There’s something to be said about walking along a nature trail and seeing these massive, man-made structures of concrete, steel, and rebar. To me, the straight line is a marvelous symbol – it’s the exact opposite of nature.

The trajectory of perfectly straight lines does exist in nature, but this kind of vector doesn’t occur because of the presence of other influences. For instance, trees would grow perfectly straight, but shifting soils, uneven distribution of nutrients, wind, and other naturally-occurring factors produce randomly mutated fractal patterns.